1. Field
The present invention relates to co-browsing in general. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and system for secure co-browsing of patient records on communication devices.
2. Background
Increasingly, mobile devices are becoming the devices of choice for users, for work as well as for personal use. Examples of such personal use include, but are not limited to, reading emails, reading news, finance information, weather forecasts, banking, and playing games. Examples of work use include, but are not limited to, tracking a sales force, sharing documents, sending emails. A lot of times, users desire to co-browse the same data files. Co-browsing includes joint navigation of the same data files or other resources substantially contemporaneously by multiple users. Co-browsing can be for personal use such as sharing a web site, ecommerce shopping, photo sharing, video sharing, social networking applications, as well as professional use such as sharing presentations, discussing documents, sharing an ecommerce page with a customer, distance learning, sharing patient records and the like.
Very often, physicians and nurses have to co-browse together to make decisions about the course of treatment for patients. By the nature of their jobs they are not always physically present when such need arises, which can be at any time of the day or night. Being able to share patient charts, such as objective information about the patient, during an audio or video call, greatly improves the time to take the decisions, as well as the quality of the decisions themselves. Such medical professionals can benefit from co-browsing by being able to view a same patient record during discussions. This improves the delivery of care both in quality (better care) and quantity (serve more patients).
It is important to note that the nature of data that is shared via co-browsing by physicians and nurses is not very dynamic in nature. Namely, the data is not generated on-the-fly during the co-browsing session, the data shared are the medical records of the patient are fairly static and stored on the electronic medical records systems. However, the patient data records themselves that are required to be shared and discussed by the physicians and nurses can be numerous within a single co-browsing session. Further, nowadays mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are widely used among physicians and nurses.
Therefore mobile devices would be an ideal candidate for the co-browsing of patient data records.
One of the major challenges for providing co-browsing on mobile devices is that the mobile devices have limited computing resources. Therefore such devices are not well equipped to support co-browsing along with audio and video communications. Further, taking into account the fact that mobile devices have diverse operating systems browsers, and that co-browsing requires special permissions and capabilities from the operating systems, and access to the workings of those browsers. Implementing co-browsing on mobile devices has presented an unsolved challenge to state of the art systems
Accordingly, there remains a need for a method and system for providing co-browsing of patient records, which can be performed using mobile devices with limited computing resources. Further, there is a need for a method and system that can work across diverse kinds of mobile devices. Still further, there is a need for a method and system which does not require special permissions and capabilities from the operating systems of mobile devices. Thus, there is a need for a method and system that can provide co-browsing of patient records using low computing resources on communication devices.